Systems that facilitate remote technical assistance are an integral part of the overall IT (information technology) products' sales, deployment, and maintenance life cycle. They are used by technical employees, business partners, and vendors to help solve hardware and software problems encountered by customers.
Typically, the technical helpdesk personnel receive an email or a call from the customer, describing the issue that needs to be fixed. They record the initial and subsequent email exchanges on that issue, as well as any other information that they consider relevant for describing or solving the problem by using specific problem management tools. This is known by various names: “problem ticket,” “trouble ticket,” and “bug report.”
Another source of problem tickets relates to tickets automatically generated by IT problem management tools when specific rules or conditions hold true in the managed IT environment. All of these tools help keep track of individual tickets by assigning each problem a specific identification code, as well as details such as the customer identification and IT system configuration context. Some configurations are inherently malfunctioning and hence generate more problem tickets than others. Although the problem ticket collection is rich in technical information reflecting the health history of a customer's environment, it is of little relevance with respect to configuration compliance when it comes to migrating IT systems and applications on those systems to new releases.
Therefore, there is a need for a system to overcome the above-stated shortcomings of the known art.